


Conjure the day

by middlemarch



Category: The Hour
Genre: Angst, Conversations, F/M, Hospitals, Male-Female Friendship, Pablo Neruda's Poetry, Poetry, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 21:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11518158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The chair beside his bed was empty more often than not. But not this evening.





	Conjure the day

“You’re here,” Freddie croaked and the straw was touching his chapped lips before he had taken the next breath. The water was tepid but sweet, though it was like knives to swallow. His thirst was like some beast, clawing at him, but the pain and fatigue of it were like a winter’s storm on the moor, sheets of rain soaking the heather, the slow, fretful fury of the sky incomprehensible. The storm was stronger and he blinked; she knew what he meant and set the cup back down.

“You’re here, Lix,” he repeated, sounding like he had drunk the whole of the bottle of whiskey she kept in her bottom drawer, but less like something that belonged in a crypt.

“Of course I am, darling. What a fool you are, Freddie, the greatest, bloody fool,” Lix said, fond as she had not quite been the night she took him to bed, her mouth soft now in a way he’d never noticed. She was in her uniform, the white silk blouse that showed her throat, the high waisted trousers, the rouge on her cheeks and darker on her lips. She sat easily in the chair beside his bed, more comfortable than Bel was, far less formal than Marnie with her bouquets of primroses and gladioli, and she shook her head at him as neither of the other women had dared or imagined.

“Why, what have I done now?” he asked, pushing himself to find words that would remind him of how he’d once been, the wunderkind and the scapegrace, the man who had subsumed his yearning for one woman in a respectable desire for another, who’d given her pleasure before she’d finished fucking him and who had known not to say very much when she passed him a cigarette afterward. It took what little he had to do it, to convince himself if not Lix, and to keep away the memory of the beating, the choking, fleeting breath than had eluded him as Bel had cried out for help, before annihilation took him.

“You know better, you ought to. If you ever listened…but then, you wouldn’t be Freddie then, would you,” she said and he understood how much older she was than he, how it was very likely, a near certainty, that he’d never attain even the least bit of Lix’s wisdom.

“Who would I be?” he whispered. Bel wouldn’t have an answer at all and Marnie would pat his hand and talk about some tidbit of news he once might have been entertained by. He could never tell Bel how genuinely entertaining Marnie could be and he didn’t have to tell Lix. Lix would answer any question and that was the most fearful thing about her, why he had bitten back any cry as he came.

“You might be someone who’d expect a friend to come see you in hospital. You might be a man who wrote the story, rather than chasing it,” Lix replied, watching him. “You might be divorced.”

“Lix.” She’d know what he meant, better than he did. She unfolded herself from the chair and reached over to brush his hair back, her touch affectionate, assessing, tracing the stitched on his cheek, the uneven whiskers at his jaw, checking him for a fever as his mother would have, reminding him of how she’d held his face when she kissed him. 

“Hush now. I’ve brought some Neruda and it’s perfect, I know you don’t understand Spanish, so you can just listen and there’s no reason to talk, just be somewhere else for a while, somewhere beautiful, hot, full of sunshine,” she said, turning the pages of the book she’d fished from her coat pocket, began reciting, “Enfermo en Vercruz, recuerdo un día/ del Sur, mi tierra, un día de plata…” 

Freddie tasted dust, wine, felt Lix’s bare shoulder next to his, closed his eyes against the brightness and listened to the shadows.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Neruda's "I Want to Go South Again: 1941," which is the poem Lix reads Freddie at the end. There is a lot (relatively speaking) of Freddie-based fic and a decent amount about Lix, but not a lot about them together and I thought seeing them together during his hospital recovery would be an interesting way to explore their relationship.


End file.
